By Joe Berk
I’ve never been one to fall for fancy newfangled gear (unless it involved fancy walnut), so for most of my life I’ve used cheap Harbor Freight earmuffs when shooting. That’s okay for most shooting, I thought, but I recently noticed that my earmuffs were interfering with getting a good cheek weld on a rifle stock when shooting from the bench. And there was another issue: Good buddy Daniel (one of the rangemasters) always has a good joke or two, and I couldn’t hear him through my earmuffs.
I noticed other guys using electronic earmuffs. You know, the kind that lets you hear normal conversation, but chops out the loud report from a handgun or rifle. They appeared in a recent ad to be slightly narrower than my el cheapo Harbor Freight muffs, too, so I thought maybe they wouldn’t interfere with the rifle’s stock. So I pulled the trigger, figuratively speaking, and ordered a pair of Razor Slim Electronic Earmuffs from Amazon.
They take two AA batteries (which are provided), and they turn on or off via a dial on back of the left earmuff. That dial also controls the volume. Turn them off, and they are like a regular set of earmuffs. Turn them on, and you can hear conversation but rifle and handgun shots are attenuated. You can control the volume, so I imagine they are pretty much like wearing hearing aids. In fact, they work almost too well in that regard. I could hear conversations a dozen benches down on the firing line, and I had to reduce the volume because I found it distracting.
I like these Razor earmuffs. I can carry on a conversation when wearing them, and that makes it nice because those with whom I’ve conversing don’t need to shout (nor do it).
There are three things I don’t like about the Razor earmuffs, but none are showstoppers and they wouldn’t prevent me from buying them. The first is that the original reason I bought them (to eliminate interference with the rifle stock), well, that isn’t what I found. The name notwithstanding (“Razors”), they interfere as much or more than a plain old set of the Harbor Freight earmuffs. The second is that it’s easy to forget to turn down the volume all the way and switch the earmuffs off, with the result being that on the next trip to the range, the batteries are dead. That one’s on me, I guess. The third reason is they are warm. The Razor earmuffs form a better seal around your ears, and on a hot day, that can be a bit of a drag. But like I said above, none of these are showstoppers for me, and they shouldn’t be for you, either.
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